Halting Problem

Here’s a great Joel Spolsky article on user interfaces from 2000. Joel’s main point is that UI design is all about correctly interpreting the user’s input — they try to do X, and you do X. Everything else flows from that.

Having read it and agreed, I want to add one thing: This is precisely why I use Linux. My idea of what should happen is often very far off from other people’s. I consider that simply a given. Assuming that, I therefore choose the interface that gives me the flexibility to make it behave exactly how I like. Enter Fluxbox, mutt, vim, etc, and some 1500 lines of config files that I drag around with me everywhere I go. Most of my everyday workflow goes through user interfaces that behave exactly as I expect them to, and as a result I am very happy with my computing experience. (For the most part. Fluxbox doesn’t seem to properly support two-dimensional workspace layouts, so I have to resort to stupid hacks to imperfectly emulate it. Fluxbox, being the ultra-configurable beast that it is, should support n-dimensional workspace layouts.)

I just logged in to a Windows test machine, and was greeted with this taskbar:

And I did have a network connection, by the way.

This is a two-parter:

Part 1: I love it when words sound like what they are. I’m not talking strictly about onomatopoeia, but any word that, once you know its meaning, fits it well. The example I’m thinking of is the Russian word ??????/niskii (short, sing/masc), and to a lesser extent (because it has fewer /i/ sounds) ??????/niskaya (short, sing/fem). I don’t have an explanation for why that word seems so fitting — there may be psychological associations for certain sounds (e.g., I remember reading somewhere a claim that English speakers associate the short i, /?/, and small things — though these words have long i’s).

Part 2: Each language has a feel. I imagine this is caused by the patterns in articulation points that are noticeably different from whatever one’s “base” language is (English in my case), and the overall rhythm. Thinking about how languages sound is more common (and more useful, certainly), but it’s interesting to remember that all those sounds are made by the mouth, which has nerve endings, and is experiencing sensation as it’s speaking.

That’s all.

[Edit: FUCK Wordpress, it ate my Unicode. You'll just have to live without it, I'm too lazy to track down the problem.]

Tonight I suddenly found myself wondering how my received emails are distributed across timezones. So, I wrote a quick Perl script to extract and total the timezone offsets from the Date: header from all my “inbox” emails (those that weren’t filtered off by some procmail rule). This is the result (click to embiggen):

I’m not terribly international (or even intercoastal) when it comes to email, at least by this totally bogus metric. The prevalence of -7000 may indicate that I get more email during the summer?

I’d have to pay more attention to the details to get any useful info out of this, but this is just for fun.

Sup is a command-line email client intended to handle large amounts of email from multiple heterogeneous sources, fast searching, flexibility through hooks, etc. Someone quoted on the website describes it as “a gmail-styled mutt-killer written in Ruby”. According to its website, “The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere.”

I am very intrigued. I haven’t tried it out yet but I intend to, probably tonight (if you didn’t before, now y’all know what my Friday nights are like).

I’ve been using Mutt exclusively for personal email for a little over 6 (!) years now, and I’ve been unable to move to anything else due to lack of flexibility. For the last two summers, though, I used gmail for work email, and was enamored with some of its attributes — the speed, the fast search, the thread view. None of those features was developed enough, though: it was a webapp, so speed was conditional on network access; search tokenized and removed non-alphanumerics, and so was hopelessly broken for my purposes; the thread view improperly flattened reply trees and didn’t rely on In-Reply-To headers; etc. And of course, no proper PGP.

This might be closer to what I want. :)

[Edit: Check out Sup's philosophy page. Oh yeah!]

[Edit 2: This is a rough summary of the packages I had to install from gems and apt on Ubuntu machine with no previous Ruby installation:
# aptitude install ruby ruby-dev rubygems libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libopenssl-ruby
# gem install sup echoe archive-tar-minitar hoe rcov nokogiri
]

[Edit 3: I'm digging it. Or, rather, I'm not digging it, but I'm not having my usual "OH GOD ITS NOT MUTT AND IT HURTS" reaction to new MUAs that aren't mutt. Trying a different MUA after 6 years of consistency is bound to cause great mental grinding. I may try to use this for a week or so. (On a humorous note, if I switch to Sup it will make my already baroque email setup even harder to move -- mutt is ubiquitous, but Sup is not, and has tons of Ruby dependencies. But I've clearly never cared about the ease of moving my email setup. I've had to do it 4 times in the last 6 years.)]

[Edit 4: At this point I'm not really sold on Sup, but I'm going to give it a full week before I make a decision. However, in the long term, I'm totally sold -- I'm going to keep an eye on Sup and probably give it a try every year. Sup is very, very immature, but it's already a solid (in my opinion) competitor to Mutt, despite lacking all kinds of features. I expect that when it's more mature it's going to be fantastic. I'm thinking of trying to help out with development. Maybe in September when I join the working world...]

Really interesting article on the evolution of the notation for large numbers, its relation to the then-current state of the art in science and math, and the implications.

It also has a wonderfully concise description of the halting problem.

I found a mention of Graham’s Number sorely lacking, however; the author got close, mentioning Ramsey theory, but then skipped over it. (But that’s really just my own petty quibble.)

Fascinating post on child emancipation (well, specifically, voting rights for children, but the comment-discussion is wider). I hadn’t really considered this issue before, but the more I do, the more grossly unjust US laws regarding children seem to me.

The whole thing is incredibly messy, but, like the author said, showing that the current situation is vastly sub-optimal is pretty easy.

From a comment by Anthony:

If a minor has a job and makes over a certain threshold of money, that minor is responsible for paying taxes. Is this taxation without representation?

Unfortunately, for me, this will probably just be another item that goes on the list of things I try not to think about, lest I become cripplingly frustrated about things that have a snowball’s chance in hell of changing.

But if the revolution comes and I have a say, I’ll remember this stuff. :)

Obama:

Medical miracles do not happen simply by accident. They result from painstaking and costly research; from years of lonely trial and error, much of which never bears fruit; and from a government willing to support that work.

[source]

I was relatively young when Bush was first elected. I don’t think I really remember what it was like to have a president who wasn’t actively hostile toward science and peddling fundamentalist Christian ideals.

Oh, and he speaks like an adult, too!

Also, there’s apparently some solid support for CA’s high-speed rail in Congress. So even though the economy’s in the shitter, we may actually see it happen. Check out this article for info about the superfast choo-choos that will eventually go between San Diego and Sacramento. 15 years from now, I’m looking forward to flying into San Diego, visiting my parents, and then taking the rail up to San Francisco for a big family gathering (where the extended family is). The ride shouldn’t take more than 3 hours.

I’m excited for the future.

…to disable logging in to an account on FreeBSD in a non-hackish way. I knew that. I swear.

http://bsdwiki.reedmedia.net/wiki/Lock_a_user_account_or_reset_a_locked_user_account.html

Seeing the discussion on Slashdot (which I’ve neglected reading for a few months now) reminds me a lot of seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show live. There’s a set of callbacks, a number of canned things that can be said for any article on a given subject or in reply to certain types of messages. Clever, new ones emerge and become popular (”What do you think of the Bush administration?“, “Ehh, I’ve seen better“), the old standards stick around, etc.

This is neither a compliment nor a criticism, just a neutral observation.

Aside: they could afford to make it clearer that they’re trimming comments to 5 by default. I thought the articles I was reading were just spectacularly unpopular. That doesn’t have an analogy in Rocky Horror, it’s just an aside. End of aside.